Bad API Response in a Tesla

[RexSpotty]

I have finally solved an obscure issue using Spotify in a 2022 Tesla M3LR that started a few (Tesla vehicle) software releases ago, maybe with 2024.14 but I can’t say for sure.

My wife and I both have our own Spotify accounts, linked to our driver profiles. She started getting a “Bad API Response” error when she used Spotify in the Tesla. My account and the car’s built in account were OK. Strangely, only playing songs from a playlist caused the error. Selecting an artist, album or podcast all worked OK.

Logging her Spotify off / on and rebooting the vehicle did not resolve the issue. A bit of Googling suggested the issue relates to special characters (@#$&*% etc) in the Spotify username. This causes an issue with one of the API calls when the Tesla communicates with Spotify.

She removed a # symbol from her user name but the problem persisted. Apparently, the Spotify API doesn’t use the user name that is visible on your profile, it uses an underlying username.

Although you can change your Spotify display name, you can’t change the underlying username. For older accounts, like hers, underlying username defaults to the display name when the account is created. For newer accounts, the underlying username is a system generated, random string of numbers and letters.

To resolve the issue you need to contact Spotify support (chat is easiest) and they will walk you through the resolution process. It might take a few attempts to get someone who understands the issue. Ask for a conversation ID from each person you chat with. This lets Spotify support people look at your prior interactions. This is important as the chat will drop out at step 3 of the resolution if you happen to be logged in using the account with the issue.

The resolution is:

1. You create a new Spotify account using a different email address to the account that is broken.
2. Spotify migrate most of the data from the old account. Some is migrated manually later.
3. Spotify delete the old account.
4. Spotify change the email on the new account to be the correct one.
5. You add the new account to your Spotify plan if necessary.
6. You manually add things that were not migrated, eg any albums you have liked.
7. If everything looks OK, you log off Spotify in the Tesla, and log back in using the QR code. It will take a while to re-synch all your data.

If that all sounds like a massive PITA, you are correct. There are workarounds for the Bad API error, such as selecting music by album / artist or selecting Spotify playlists on your phone. So you might just want to put up with the issue and hope Tesla or Spotify fix it in a future software release. My gut feel was the issue was likely to become more widespread in subsequent Telstra software updates so I bit the bullet.

Pro tip. All suggested music & personalised playlists will be lost by this process so you need to retrain the Spotify recommendations algorithm. When you create the new Spotify account it will ask you for three artists to seed the  algorithm. Don’t just pick the first three that pop up as you can’t undo this and the algo will keep suggesting those artists until your actual listening habits take precedence.

If you have a simpler solution, please reply to this post.

Hope this helps someone.